Avast, me hearties! Arrrr!
September 19th every
year is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Started by John Baur and Mark
Summers as a bit of a private in-joke in 1995, it took off in 2002 when it was
picked up by Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry. But where does that pirate
accent come from?
The stereotypical one we hear
most often in films and on TV shows has similarities to current South-Western
accents of mainland Britain, e.g., Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Cornwall. While
it is likely that many British pirates originated from that region, others did
not (I grew up in Kent, for example, which is also associated with pirates and
smugglers). What we associate with the typical pirate accent may well be
based on well-known actors’ portrayals of pirates, with Dialect Blog
suggesting the speech of the entire genre was based on 1950s screen actor
Robert Newton, who was born and raised in Dorset.
Interestingly, this is not the
direction Johnny Depp decided to go with Captain Jack Sparrow, whose accent –
if the trivia is correct – was based on Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards
(Richards appears as Sparrow’s father in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s
End). In fact, although Geoffrey Rush does a pretty close approximation
to the stereotypical pirate accent, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has
pirates with accents of English from all over the world, including rather posh ones (e.g.,
Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan), Jamaican ones (e.g., Tia Dalma), as well as
Russian, Turkish, Chinese and Dutch; this was probably nearer the truth. One theory of pidginisation is known as the 'nautical jargon theory', which observes that many Pidgins have nautical words in them (e.g., the word capsize to mean 'turn over' or 'spill') and may have arisen from the development of a common language on board ship during European colonial days; that certainly has piratical connections.
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is such fun; perhaps we should think about talking like other character types.
Something more modern perhaps?
Talk Like Siri day, anyone ..?
... or like HAL 9000?
ReplyDeleteCreepy!
Delete... but foolproof and incapable of error.
DeleteOf course, nothing like RP existed in the Age of Piracy, nor any seriously non-rhotic accents. But so much the less did they exist in the 14C, and we still enjoy Olivier and Branagh.
ReplyDeleteThat said, there were plenty of pirates working off the east coast of what's now the U.S., and their accents were already different from their colinguists to the south and east.
Absolutely.
DeleteThe OP Shakespeare is fascinating, as it sounds a lot like modern West Country and/or the Anglo Irish accent (Think Bono, or Michael Fassbender in X-Men First Class).
ReplyDeleteYes, it's fascinating, isn't it? Reconstructed as accurately as possible.
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